ForgotPassword?
Sign Up
Search this Topic:
Forum Jump
Posts: 3031
Aug 9 11 7:30 PM
Snappleshacks wrote:videofarmer wrote: I don't think it's right for someone to use other writers characters while saying newer writers should not have that same privilege, just because that someone is more skillful. Although the current crop of writers may not say something great using established characters there is a chance they may say something good.I see what you're saying but I think you're missing the forest for the trees re: Moore's objection. It's not about someone writing the further adventures of Rorshach; it's about the context of that in an industry that is content to wallow in nostalgia rather than create anything new or meaningful. Almost all of the industry heavy hitters came out nearly two decades ago. That's just embarrassing. Contrast that with what Moore is doing when he uses previously established characters...
videofarmer wrote: I don't think it's right for someone to use other writers characters while saying newer writers should not have that same privilege, just because that someone is more skillful. Although the current crop of writers may not say something great using established characters there is a chance they may say something good.
Yeah, I know what you're saying too, but since you brought up context, let's consider when Moore and Miller were writing. In the mid-eighties, comics were just emerging from a period of extended naivety which began in the mid-fifties with the implementation of the comics code authority and the downfall of EC Comics. In fact, super hero comics had barley ventured beyond their initial childish stage since their beginnings in the late thirties. Some of the grittiest, most challenging super-hero books during the CCA period were three issues of Amazing Spider-Man which dared to show that using drugs could be bad. In the eighties writers knew they had an adult audience as well as an audience of kids and were starting to explore stories that were more complex, putting Moore and Miller at the perfect place in history to introduce their transformative tales. Now, the slap-in-the-face, the-wake-up-call has already happened. Readers understand the potential of the medium and the art-form in America was forever changed. It was changed by starting the elimination of the conditions that led to those stories.
Comics are no longer in that innocent, naive state that was enforced by a code that said the entire medium was only meant for children. Revolutionary comics like those produced in the mid-eighties can't be created again until there is another set of conditions that is ripe for a new revolution (maybe we're getting to that point now). That said, you're right in that no revolutionary comics have been produced since then, but some great comics certainly have. There has to be lulls between revolutions, periods of time where more of the changes are to style than to substance, and in the years since the eighties, there have been some creators that have been very influential on style, and even some that have made substantive changes.
Keeping that in mind (if anyone buys into what I'm selling there, that is), if previously established characters can only be used in truly great or revolutionary stories and not just in really good or entertaining stories, those characters will never be used and the chance to create a new revolutionary work with them may never be seized.
Share This